Best of the Transparent Hummingbird
Without constitutional protection for property we still house our people;
if they were synonymous, then nonconstitutionalist illberalism, but in fact — non liberal constittuionalims — effect limtis on comunity norms and instituions derive from communities
Constitutionalism is about how we frame our public life,
I favour cosmopolital, autonomist, personally expressive — but I have never seen Singapore’s but progressvisit
We should be able to — and I think to a great extent Singapore has — crafted these values into a constitutionalist structure.
– so that they have public status but do not infringe overly into
And it would be folish to divide up aainst — we have liberal and illiberal (or should i say non-liberal) elements
I do not go as far as to say that the liberal state is a form of covert coercion — but how we create a framework for states to operate — – philosophical basis that any government needs to be constrained
and to use community and cultural values to constraint the state, rather than liberal ideals to constrained the
It isn’t that there aren’t collectivist dangers — and, Singapore has had that tendency, up till the 90s. But I simply don’t think this is true of Singapore today. We’re To Americans, constitutionalism means liberal constitutionalism, which leaves no room other forms of constitutions– theocratic constitutions, for instance, (but not theocracies) - or more communitarian constitutions like Singapore’s. It’s misguided — we are not a tyranny, we are not even, come to that, authoritarian, as characterised by Western media, because that suggests we do not abide by the rule of law. We do, but we are more instrumentalist about law. We govern on the basis of rule BY law, if you will, if not entirely rule OF law.
What is the point of electing people to run things if you have no trust in them and have to check on them yourself? I only have American politicians to compare them to, but on the whole I
singaporeans make the mistake of thinking that because our judicial review processes are not powerful in the way we are so used to seeing in american judicial review, that because our judges are more formalist in our legal reasoning, that this is somehow because our courts are not free or influenced by the but the fact is most british colonies which are westminister-style systems recognise parliamentary supremacy rather than constitutional supremacy. when the judges say they have no discretion, they don’t. now if the basic features doctrine was accepted in singapore it’s
i’m not being an apologist — i find teo soh lung such a disturbing case — and
“The willingness,” [says Scarry] “continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep across through a certain patch of sky.” (p7)
I’ve always appreciated having friends in whose company you learnt new things, who helped you, because of their superior eye and taste and knowledge, to help you learn to develop your own sensibilities, and to develop your sense and understanding of what was good, so that even when you did not instinctively like something you could understand why someone might. I was reminded of this only a few days ago, when a photographer friend was looking at two similar photos — i like this one, i said, looking at the line of the dancer’s body, but he showed me why the other, that i had dismissed, was compositionally superior to his photographer’s eye.
I used to have Kenneth for music (he’d make me mixed tapes of interesting music, things I would never have found for myself — these days I tend not to listen to new music anymore), though I still have Adeline for contemporary art and opera — Julian for science — Vaughn for typography and food.
I suppose my sole contribution to our set is giving people books, because I didn’t need anyone for literature — besides our set reads, we all read feverishly.
lee ufan, park seo bo and kim tschang yeul were my first introduction to korean contemporary art (post-war tansaekhwa movement art). the SAM hosted a large korean contemporary exhibition — and that was one of my first writing tasks at the Embassy, the exhibition opening speech.
bold, chromatic, western in tenor yet still somehow identifiably korean. singapore